Hello, and welcome back! Or welcome, if you missed last month’s chat. We’ve got a lot of topics we could discuss–for instance, electronics recycling, connected-TV apps, car stereos and “QAM” digital-cable compatibility, to go over my recent posts here. But it’s ultimately up to you. What would you like to talk about?

That was one of Apple’s surprising announcements this week–beyond unveiling its next operating system, OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion, months in advance to a select few journalists, the company also said that it will switch to shipping new versions of OS X every year.

I suppose Microsoft may feel offended–they’re closer to an every-three-years update cycle. But I also worry about the potential of change for change’s sake. OS X Lion has turned out to be a seriously problematic release for me, in part because Apple revised parts that were perfectly fine in Snow Leopard. Take Address Book and iCal–please! Since when did they need to look like paper equivalents, including slow page-flipping animations?

Also: AAPL investors take note–a yearly upgrade cycle, assuming OS installs through the Mac App Store remain painless–should yield a tidy chunk of cash.

If you have any PowerPC apps–say, an old version of Quicken–there’s no question that you should stay on SL. But even then… well, I just re-read my first review of Lion to see what I liked about it. The only ones that still stand out are auto-save (which has come at the cost of doubling the time needed to save-as a file) and internal security fixes inside it that I never actually see.

Otherwise–it’s been a lot of default settings to change, Safari and its auto-reloading page, a Mail app that on my Mac, has an annoying habit of freezing up and then crashing when I’m in the middle of composing a message. I’m not saying it’s Apple’s Vista… but it is a serious disappointment. Even at only $30.

It looks creepy–and apparently Google has already pulled back on this front. But you know, there are much creepier privacy issues out there. When you’ve got some time, you have to read the NYT’s long piece about Target’s behavioral tracking of shoppers. That goes way beyond dropping an anonymized cookie on your phone’s browser.

“Sort of technical” is what I do here! By all accounts, you should not see that happen–the point of in-dash control of an iPod is that it should, you know, actually work. That’s why Apple has an entire licensing/certification system.

Good question, but I don’t know the answer and neither do people who have looked at this much closer than me. Lion required that you run Snow Leopard, but that also needed the Mac App Store–which itself wasn’t compatible with earlier releases. The App Store runs on both SL and Lion, so maybe that would allow a SL-to-ML jump? We shall see.

Conveniently enough, I wrote about that just this morning. (Technically, I wrote about it yesterday, but the piece didn’t get posted until this a.m.) My predictions are based solely from having followed Apple for a long time, not on clandestine meetings with Apple whistleblowers or stealing prototype hardware left in bars–but I think they’re pretty good anyway:

* Siri. Duh. Can you see a scenario in which that doesn’t happen?

* Better cameras.

* More storage–flash memory is cheap, cheap, cheap.

* A faster processor.

* LTE? I am not so sure. Given Apple’s commitment to battery life, I don’t see how it does that unless the next iPad is even more battery on the inside, or if it’s got the long-awaited single-chipset LTE+3G solution on the inside.

There was a good piece in the Post a few weeks ago about this–yeah, here it is. I get that publishers worry about demand for their work eroding when anybody can borrow it for free that much more easily. But at the same time, somebody who goes looking for the book in a library, by definition, is not somebody who had making a purchase at the top of their to-do list.

It would also help if there weren’t so many e-books priced higher than their paper equivalents.

(I should note here that I’ve yet to buy an e-book outside the context of a review. The idea that the DRM attached to it can void my ownership rights later on bugs me.)

Home automation has been up and coming for least 15 years. I can specify that many because I remember the Post running a long feature about home automation in ’96 or ’97. It’s not that the industry hasn’t settled on standards or that it’s still so hard to network devices–wireless has tackled a lot of that. But there are so many different devices to connect, and a lot of people have trouble remembering to program their thermostat. (Which, incidentally, is the extent of the automation in our home.)

Interesting. I would expect that it would at least be a smooth transition, not like the destructive upgrade required to go from Windows XP to Windows 7–or from 32-bit Win 7 to the x64 release.

I would also assume that this would be a cheap upgrade. At $30 a pop for SL, Apple clearly prioritizes volume over profit margins. Not that it’s having any trouble with them…

It’s been a slow reintroduction, hasn’t it? OTOH, look at how RIM has been doing with its own transition. I have to give Nokia a reasonable amount of credit for switching to Windows Phone 7 as fast as it has. And the Nokia 900 I briefly inspected at CES did look sharp. I’m looking forward to trying it out.

The risk with its WP7 strategy is that when people primarily shop for phones by OS, Nokia has picked a third-place contender after iOS and Android. I don’t think this has to be a two-OS market–I certainly don’t want it to be one–but that is a gamble.

This just might be the topic of next week’s post–so glad you mentioned it. What we’re talking about is a system for “voluntary incentive auctions” in which TV stations not using all of their assigned DTV spectrum (for instance, the local Fox station in D.C, which doesn’t air any secondary DTV channels) could give back that spectrum to the feds, who would then auction it to wireless carriers and kick back some of the proceeds to the station. In the bargain, some stations might swap frequencies to free up still more airwaves. It’s been a CEA policy priority for a while.

More wireless spectrum is good, period. But I do want to know the details: Who winds up with the spectrum freed up? Does it all go to wireless carriers or is some reserved for unlicensed devices? And will the new frequencies assigned to some TV stations offer about the same coverage as before?

If you have other questions, let me know.

That must be a highlight of your job

Compare my hesitation over buying a DRMed e-book to how quickly I will buy a DRM-free song or album. There’s no hangup there, because I know my purchase will work on the devices of my choice. Also, don’t publishers not want Amazon to control the entire market? Wrapping up their titles in Amazon’s proprietary DRM doesn’t exactly further that goal.

With your PC? None that come to mind. Google+ will sync them to Google’s own site instantly, and it looks like Flickr’s app will do the same across multiple sites. But for phone to computer syncing, the model there seems to be batch transfers. Then again, you’d need your computer to be up and online all the time for instant, automatic sync to work. Is that really what you want?

There is the Find My Phone feature, through which you can track the phone, pop up a “return this please” message on its screen and remotely wipe the phone of all your data if necessary. But as I’ve read, it will still receive iMessages even afterwards–they’re tied to its SIM card in some way. (Right?) I would think they’d fix that, because that is a pretty huge privacy risk.

I did a piece for Reader’s Digest on that a little while back–which is probably obsolete, but still. Anyway, for most cases I have to suggest the iPad. It’s affordable, it works and with iOS 5 you don’t need a computer to set it up, back it up or update it. I like the Kindle Fire as well; it’s not as polished but at $199 it doesn’t have to be.

I’m still waiting to see a full-fledged Android tablet that I can really like. Not there yet. But somebody has to get that right.

Thanks! Should’ve checked to see if it does photo syncing; I’ve only ever used it to sync music. Info at doubletwist.com

From what I’ve read–my friend Wayne Rash has written about this at great length for eWeek and, as a private pilot, knows a thing or two about the importance of GPS for navigation–there’s no “possible” about that conflict. It’s real and it can’t be fixed–which means Lightsquared is in serious trouble. I don’t see them as being able to make a viable bid for the spectrum that the incentive auctions would free up.

It’s too bad–I’d like to see more competition in wireless. But I also don’t want to see a huge chunk of the installed base of GPS get wiped out by interference. Sorry…

Of course there’s a relationship. The CE industry’s work has opened up enormous new markets for the entertainment industry. Some of it has been used for copyright infringement too–but c’mon, the balance is overwhelmingly positive. I hope our friends in Hollywood realize that.

Hollywood executives can and do show up at CES; I led a tour for a few at this year’s show for CEA.

I’d like for you to know as well. But that’s up to your carrier. Samsung has committed to shipping Ice Cream Sandwich (aka, Android 4.0), but each carrier also has to certify and ship its own version of that update.

This is, IMHO, a serious and growing probem for Android. I underestimated it myself in my past coverage.

It’s a little after 1, but we had a slow start and I got briefly sidetracked, so I’ll stick around a little longer.

That doesn’t sound quite right. USB storage is the option you should see when you plug the phone into a computer (note that some Android phones only present themselves a special sort of media-files-only device, making them visible only to iPhoto on a Mac unless you install some extra software from Google).

You can move individual apps from the phone’s memory to the SD Card in Android 2.1 or newer–open the Settings app, select Applications, select Manage Applications–but unless you’ve rooted the phone you can’t make SD Card the default.

There are some publishers that do that–without DRM. The technical publisher O’Reilly and Associates (they do the “in a nutshell” series, with a different animal on each cover) takes pride in doing everything DRM-free. Somehow, that has not bankrupted them.

It’s a mix of people I follow on Twitter (to name a few, Glenn Fleishman, Mat Honan, Jacqui Cheng, Harry McCracken) and blogs I follow on RSS (Ars Technica, Techdirt, Lifehacker, TechCrunch, Daring Fireball, TidBITS).

Priority is the right word. A lot of phone vendors do dedicate serious resources to Android software development–in the form of proprietary user-interface layers or apps that don’t add much value to the phone experience but do complicate supporting each new Android OS release. For example, Samsung is not shipping an ICS update for the first round of Galaxy S phones because they don’t have enough memory for that as well as Samsung’s TouchWiz interface.

Now, have any of you started or refined your phone shopping by saying “What I really want is Android with TouchWiz; it’s not the same without that?” I’m thinking not.

By “original Nintendo,” do you mean the ’80s-vintage NES?

a) Wow.

b) So yours does at least have a composite-video output. (The Wikipedia entry says that some shipped with only RF, which would require getting an adapter.) Does it work with other TVs or monitors? It could be dead.

Tell you what, this may take a little more research than I can do in this chat. But it might also be a fine subject for the tech Q&A column I do for USA Today’s site. E-mail me at rob@robpegoraro.com and I’ll try to figure this out.

Okay, there is no way I can top a question like that. Also, it’s lunchtime. So I’ll wrap this chat up; thanks to everyone for showing up and making the chat interesting. I’ll see you here next month!

[Tap tap] Hey, is this thing on?

Hello, and welcome to my first Web chat at CEA, and my first of any kind since April. The agenda today is CES–the hardware and software introduced at the electronics show, plus the items that did not make an appearance there–but no reasonable tech query will be refused. (I just may have to throw out some vague and snarky response if I don’t know the answer to your question.)

Since we already have some questions stacking up in the queue–let’s go!

I’ll start with the question I’ve heard more than once since coming back from Vegas. First, somebody else will get to do the opening keynote, but I don’t know who. (Should I throw my name in? I’m not that good with PowerPoint, though.) Somebody else will get Microsoft’s exhibit space.

But it’s not like the show will be devoid of Windows 8 computers and Windows Phone phones. I’d note that even Macworld Expo seems to be doing well without Apple.

In other words, don’t expect the cab lines to be any shorter!

I could not be more delighted at that news. (Jason works at CEA, if the name doesn’t ring a bell to you all.) I had hoped we’d see something like this happen–but as I noted on my blog yesterday, the entertainment industry had run up a very long winning streak in Washington, in which even its setbacks mostly happened out of the spotlight.

But this time around, they pretty much got crushed in public, on the front page and on the evening news. This is a healthy development for our democracy.

But you have to expect that the backers of SOPA and PIPA will try again in a year or so, just as the defeat of the COICA bill last yea was followed by the debut of those two bills this year.

Great question. I re-read some of my own coverage of tablets at CES 2011, and as you can see I gave Google too much credit for developing a good tablet operating system and gave developers way too much credit for being ready to ship tablet-optimized apps. With Ice Cream Sandwich–aka, Android 4.0–unifying the phone and tablet versions of Android, I’d like to think the app-compatibility hangup will go away. (Here’s my first-look post on ICS.)

I’m a little more optimistic about tablets getting ICS updates–at least, the tablets that don’t include 3G support. In that case, you only have one company, the manufacturer, standing in the way of an update. With phones, you have the manufacturer and the carrier. But your larger point is correct: Vendors need to support their products by shipping Google’s updates to Android.

Heh: I went to CES with a 2010 model of laptop. I like the Ultrabook concept–if anything, I plan on getting my ThinkPad a little closer to that by replacing its hard drive with an SSD, aka solid state drive–but it would behoove manufacturers to get their prices below Apple’s. (It’s a novel development in the computer business when you can say that.) I’m also not a fan of laptops that are too thin to accomodate a regular Ethernet jack, inasmuch as the most reliable bandwidth at CES is not WiFi but wired Internet in press rooms.

Depends on the phone in question. On the Sprint WiMax phones I’ve tested, the power-control widgets include one to turn 4G on or off. On the Verizon LTE models I’ve tried, the procedure is much more difficult. But my friend Craig goes through this crazy workaround to shut off LTE on this ThunderBolt; the battery life isn’t acceptable otherwise, and he said he doesn’t really notice the extra speed of LTE in the phone’s browser anyway.

If you’ve kept a laptop running for seven years… wow. You have my permission to upgrade, FWIW. And you may not have to settle for a smaller screen; Samsung showed off an Ultrabook-esque laptop with a 15-in. screen. It was quite the looker, although at $1,500 it had better be.

It’s too bad I didn’t run into Joz at CES! I’m positive that Apple has been sending people to CES for years–they’d be crazy not to do that recon on their competitors. (It’s not like they can’t afford airfare from SFO to Vegas.) But it was a little surprising to see somebody who would be recognized so easily.

This Mirage pretty much astounded me by having reliable, fast WiFi. Much better than what I’d seen out of in-room Internet before.

I’ve jinxed it for everybody else, haven’t I? Sorry.

The 900 is basically the flagship phone that Windows Phone 7 hasn’t really had until now. (See Engadget’s writeup of it.) It looks good on paper–4.3-in. screen, LTE, 8-megapixel camera–and feels solid but also light and thin in person. But I don’t know about its battery life; LTE has been a battery hog on other phones, mainly because it requires a second chipset for LTE, and an 1840 mAH battery seems on the small side. (For more on that, I point you to ZDNet’s well-reasoned rant about too-small smartphone batteries.)

Also unknown: What the selection of WP7 apps will be like when it ships on AT&T, at a still-unannounced price.. Microsoft has done pretty well overall, with about 50,000 apps, but that’s still way behind iOS or Android.

You heard it here first: Look for a push-to-talk version of the iPhone to ship for Nextel in April. On April 1, if my sources are correct.

I’m concerned with how many upcoming Android models use LTE and larger screens–both destructive to battery life–as their selling points. ICS should make it easier to deal with bloatware, though; you can “disable” an app, which hides it from view and stops it from running (although it still eats up storage space).

The built-in e-mail–not Gmail–client is not very good. I switched to using K-9 Mail, a free and open-source client. The interface isn’t the most elegant and the icon looks ugly to me, but it’s fast, reliable and frequently updated. I suspect you’d like that, coming from a BlackBerry.

You get the prize for “most distant chatter” today (unless one of you is jacking in from somewhere in Asia). I wish I’d had more time to study some of the connected wellness devices, like the Withings WiFi scale, and trying out devices like the Jawbone Up–after they fix the bug that led them to halt production–is on my to-do list for the year.

I think being able to track your progress is a huge help. (Well, assuming there is progress. Between the holidays and CES, I seem to have put on a few pounds. It seems I was misinformed when I was told that Vegas was a hub of clean living.) But if you can also make this a bit of a social aspect–are you doing better or worse than your neighbors/friends/anonymized fellow users–that would motivate people even more strongly, I suspect.

It’s a shame about webOS. It looked immensely promising when Palm unveiled that software and the Pre at CES, but Palm took too long to ship updated phones, developer support ebbed and HP turned out not to be the best corporate parent. I think the market needs a third player to keep Apple and Android vendors honest… looks like that’s Microsoft’s job now.

And speaking of HP–the company did not have an exhibit on the floor but did send their usual reps and exhibited at the two third-party reception/exhibitions that happen on the first two nights, Digital Experience and ShowStoppers. (Some companies do that, as CEA’s Jason Oxman noted in a possibly-cranky post reacting to some of the “CES is dying! OMG!” stories that ran after Microsoft announced its exit.) Their big news was an ultrabook, the Envy 14 Spectre, and an all-in-one desktop with a 27-in. screen.

Thanks! I’ll second that recommendation for Lifehacker; it’s a great site for tech tips and has informed more than a few of my own tip-of-the-week stories.

I’m seriously puzzled by that phone too. It did fit in my shirt pocket–but a 5.3-in. screen? Really? What actual usability problem does that solve? And what kind of battery life does it have, between that enormous display and the LTE radio inside?

Maybe the secret of the Note is that it will get great battery life by being all battery on the inside.

Talk to your favorite Windows developers. They’ll need to port their apps over to the ARM processors almost all Windows 8 tablets will use (although Intel showed off one tablet running on one of its x86 chips) and to the Metro interface tablets will require. Once they do that work–or competitors provide acceptable tablet-compatible substitutes–you could be in good shape.

I’m in my 40s, and I can feel old when I look at some of the marketing that goes on at CES. (To be fair, I didn’t grok a lot of the car-audio pitches when I was in my 20s!) I’d be more concerned about the hardware and software, though; the marketing you do at a trade show doesn’t necessarily correlate with what you see on TV or in stores six months later.

Fulton Innovation’s eCoupled is a wireless charging system that I first saw at CES in, I think, 2007. It looks like it’s ready to roll now–they had a convincing demo of a phone charging from inside a purse--but it and other inductive-charging systems (Powermat, Qi) suffer from being on the wrong end of a network effect. That is, until you can count on a decent chunk of new gadgets supporting the same no-wire charging system, you don’t have a good reason to invest in a wireless or inductive charger. The Qi folks (that’s an emerging standard for this) say they’ve got momentum on their side, but I want to see actual phones with Qi support listed on the box.

Thanks! There are two models for this sort of transition. The best-case scenario is the remarkably rapid switchover Apple developers made, first from Mac OS to Mac OS X and then from PowerPC to Intel. At the other end, you have all of the developers who couldn’t even be bothered to fix their apps to work right in Windows Vista, a far smaller shift. Which developers will show up for Windows 8?

The NYT reporters are always so easy to spot, too–they’re the guys in suits. I trust that none of the people who just wrote “CES is irrelevant” posts will show up at CES 2013.

Now, obviously, you’re reading this at CEA’s site from a guy who freelances for CEA. I’m not a disinterested observer. But I think it’s a mistake to extrapolate from Comdex–by all accounts, a seriously mismanaged show–to CES. Most of the companies there can’t afford to pull an Apple and summon the press to their own launch event on a week’s notice. CES also has a business function separate from product launches; retailers and marketers go there to strike deals.

I did not know the percentage was that high. Thanks!

You’d think there would be a version of Quicken for the iPad–there was a version of Quicken for the Newton!–but that hasn’t happened, even as Intuit has been shipping iOS TurboTax apps for a few years. I’d look at other iOS personal-finance apps, although I have to confess that I haven’t tried any of them. I switched to Mint a few years ago and haven’t looked back.

I was wondering if your trip involved a slingshot or a Slingbox…

It’s extremely difficult to get WiFi to work when you have hundreds of different access points in close proximity–the standard just wasn’t written for that scenario, as Glenn Fleishman wrote in a good post last year after Apple’s WiFi meltdown at its own developers conference. You can work on 3G and 4G coverage by parking more COWs (cell on wheels) and COLTs (cell on light trucks); I can attest that Verizon’s coverage was pretty reliable this year.

Here’s a non-CES question. Sorry to hear of your husband’s troubles. In general, anytime you have a tech product that isn’t purchased by its actual users–say, some specialized app bought by a company’s IT department–bad things tend to happen. The market can’t send its usual do-your-job signals. The Lifehacker site I mentioned has posted a lot of useful advice about optimizing Windows, but it sounds like the simplest upgrade might be to add some memory to his work computer. Maybe he could take up yoga as well?

This one’s a bit far afield, as I’m not an education reporter. But my hunch is that the success of Apple’s new venture into e-textbooks will vary immensely among individual school districts, based on things like what existing contracts they have signed, how many iPads they’d need to provide for students who don’t have one, and how often they buy new textbooks. It would be a mistake to assume an automatic Apple success, especially given how unimpressive iBooks now looks two years after its debut.

If you stick to sites that encrypt your session–something that Google’s web apps do by default and Facebook and Twitter do as well–you don’t have to trust the WiFi. (Many other sites encrypt your login but not everything after.)

The bigger risk at CES is losing a gadget. I was exceedingly alarmed the second night when I realized I only had two phones on me, not the three I’d been carrying a few minutes ago. A few minutes later, I realized that I’d put the third phone on the Qi inductive-charging exhibit–a table filled with other cell phones. So of course I didn’t notice the presence of yet another phone when I walked away.

I should have done the math on that after seeing Sharp’s 8K (!) demo; if Apple can advertise the iPhone’s screen as a “retina display,” in that its individual pixels are too small to be discerned at a normal viewing distance, what sort of TV resolution do you need to hit the same goal?

Plus, 8K may be a little too much resolution. When you can see distinct pores on a person’s face–the kind of detail you’d usually see only when you’re right next to them–that may be a little too much reality.